AA Battery Carnbooth

A World War II anti-aircraft battery was sited to the west of Carmunock. Site number GSG3 (early), S3 (later). Part of the Clyde AA Defences, the site was known as Carnbooth, possibly Mid Netherton or Carmunock.

The Carnbooth battery is significant in that it is one of a small number of former World War II heavy anti-aircraft batteries that were converted for use during the Cold War.

World War II

The battery was equipped with four gun emplacements, command post, two magazines, GL Radar mat to the north, and an accommodation camp to the east.

Cold War

Aerial photographs of the site taken in 1946 show only the World War II structures on the site: the command post, emplacements, and magazines. Later photographs, and current mapping, shows the addition of an engine room and a computer room to the south of the original buildings, and a site visit confirmed that the four gun emplacements had also been extensively modified.

These changes suggest that the battery had been incorporated into the Cold War anti-aircraft defences created as part of the postwar ROTOR air defence system, a massive air defence radar system created during the 1950s to counter the threat of Soviet bombers, and which controlled anti-aircraft batteries operated by Fighter Command and the British Army.

Site visit

A site visit was carried out during 2008 and identified the usual structures associated with a standard World War II Type L battery. Four emplacements, a partly buried command post, two magazine buildings, and a small workshop/store building were identified. In addition, to the south of the original battery buildings lie the later engine room and computer room, added as part of the postwar conversion.

The four gun emplacements were found to have been of a Type L construction, but the six original sheltered ammunition stores constructed around the perimeter of each emplacement had been removed and replaced by four Type H structures. In addition, each emplacement was provided with its own engine room.

Other than a few concrete bases and some piles of demolition debris, little remains of the accommodation camp. Some evidence of the camp sewage system remains evident on the ground.

A modern communications installation lies a short distance to the southwest, complete with equipment building and mast within a fenced compound, but this has no relation to the anti-aircraft battery site.